Fear of hackers holds back online voting in the US

The technology is ready for elections to be held online, but until cybersecurity is strengthened they are on hold

DESPITE perennial efforts to "get out the vote", voter turnout in the US remains low - just 60 per cent in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The main excuse is that getting to polling stations is too inconvenient. But with smartphones and computers at everyone's fingertips, why can't people vote online?

In a few local races, they can. In 2009, Honolulu held the nation's first "all-digital" election for city administrators. Each voter received a passcode to allow them into a website where they could cast their ballot electronically. This year, for the first time, Google and Facebook have started allowing voters to register through their sites.

But online voting remains illegal for state and federal elections, mostly due to security concerns. In a conventional voting system, fraud might mean altering a few paper ballots, the thinking goes, but a networked online system could be compromised across the board. Even so, worries about voting fraud that seem to surface at every election have so far come to naught. "The difference is that internet risk is wholesale," says David Wagner of the University of California, Berkeley.

Proponents of online voting argue the security risks can be addressed, and are more than worth the reward of higher voter turnouts. The electronic voting company Everyone Counts, based in San Diego, California, is courting voters living abroad. Thirty states now allow overseas voters to send their votes in as email attachments or through web portals, and the company hopes that by showing their website is safe, they can gain a foothold in the domestic voter population as well. Surprisingly, the firm's market research shows internet voting would draw a higher percentage of older voters than younger - probably because of the convenience.

Yet the first test of an online voting platform failed spectacularly. In 2010, the District of Columbia tested the system it had commissioned for its school board elections by inviting the public to hack it - normally a federal crime. It took Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his students, just 36 hours to exploit a vulnerability in the system and "elect" the robot Bender from the TV show Futurama as school board president.

The stunt also raised the spectre of foreign interests launching attacks against online voting systems. While inside the DC school board's system, Halderman says that he saw attacks from China, Iran and India. "Resisting a state-level attacker is something we don't know how to do well," he says.

In other countries, online voting has been done effectively. Estonia, for example, has held online elections since 2005, as have several other countries. The difference, says Smith, is that unlike the US, Estonia has a national identification system for its citizens.

As a whole, "the US is not likely to accept internet voting for some time", admits Laura Potter of software firm Konnech, based in Okemos, Michigan. But the company believes there is a market for taking local elections digital in the meantime. Their smartphone app, ABVote, will be tested this year in a mock citywide election in Detroit. Potter hopes success will help convince election officials to accept their system. "When the states are ready, we are ready," she says.

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